· Image Search

Most everyone has a personal stable of favourite actors. Not poster-on-the-wall, secret-crush, my-hero-type favourites, but supporting actors who have some appealing quality, and as such could be described, in salesmen's lingo, as "value-added." As in, whenever that person shows up in a film, you're that much more likely to see it. If the film in question is X, and your eagerness to see it is Y, and X = Y, then (X + Steve Buscemi) = 2Y. Or something like that.

For example, Nicolas Cage used to be a value-added actor for me. Steve Buscemi still is one, while John Malkovich is borderline (enough to get me to In The Line of Fire, but not to Rounders). Only the coming together of these three pried me out of my chair and into Con Air. When I walked out, Nicolas Cage was officially off the list, and Steve Buscemi was on probation.

The indie-film explosion of the early '90s unearthed, for me, two new value-added actors: Chris Eigeman and Martin Donovan. Eigeman was a regular in the films of Whit Stillman (and the reason why I sat through a few episodes of the spotty and atrociously titled It's Like, You Know...), while Donovan starred in Hal Hartley films.

You might remember Donovan: he was always a hipster type and always very deadpan. Partly this was the Hal Hartley style, but Donovan has carried it over and made it his own personal character-actor trademark. In effect, he's become the deadpan Andrew McCarthy. (They look quite similar, but that's where it ends. McCarthy always seemed kind of humid and dewy onscreen -- he was always sweating, or sputtering, or in a tizzy, so that he seemed moist enough that some sort of cheese might be growing in the cleft beneath his nose -- whereas Donovan is bone-dry, all the way through.)

Donovan has played a deadpan gay man in The Opposite of Sex, and a deadpan doctor in the short-lived TV series Wonderland. He was a deadpan pornographer in Amateur. Soon, you can enjoy him as a (no doubt) deadpan associate of the decidedly un-deadpan Al Pacino -- the very antithesis of deadpan, the oil to deadpan's water -- in Insomnia.

You might think, "Oh, Martin Donovan, what's he done?" Well, he always makes every movie he's in a little bit better, and he does it while looking cool and talking really flatly and never breaking a sweat. And if that's not something, than we might as turn out the lights right now.